A Chinese official defended the mass detention of Uighur Muslims in his country this week, describing the camps where they were being held as vocational training centers where “students” have access to everything from ping-pong and free nutritious meals to rooms equipped with TV and air conditioning.
China once denied detaining Uighur Muslims. Now an official claims it’s a good thing.
An official in Xinjiang province defended detention camps as just job and educational programs.
Jen Kirby is a senior foreign and national security reporter at Vox, where she covers global instability.
It was the most explicit statement yet from the Chinese government about the “re-education camps,” where approximately one million Uighurs, a Muslim minority group in China’s western Xinjiang province, are being confined against their will.
China is currently facing intense international pressure over its crackdown on the Uighur community.
Human rights organizations, researchers, and former detainees describe the camps as prisons, and say Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups have been made to undergo psychological indoctrination, such as being forced to study communist propaganda and to give thanks to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Some reports say they’ve been tortured through waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
Chinese officials had previously tried to deny or downplay the existence of the camps. But last week, officials in the region admitted the camps existed, made them legal, and said that their purpose was to fight religious extremism and terrorism.
Shohrat Zakir, a senior official in Xinjiang province who is also a Uighur, went one step further — comparing the centers to “boarding schools” and its detainees to “students.” Zakir said they can take classes on hairdressing and e-commerce, and have access to counseling services in an interview with state-run media, according to the Guardian.
“Many trainees have said they were previously affected by extremist thought and had never participated in such kinds of arts and sports activities. Now they realize how colorful life can be,” Zakir reportedly told Xinhua, the state-run news agency.
Uighur separatists have staged attacks in China, and Uighur fighters have gone abroad to join jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. But those instances are now being used to justify the arbitrary detainment of at least one million people — and possibly more.
Zakir’s comments are the latest example of China trying to reframe the narrative around its detainment of Uighurs. The timing of this PR offensive isn’t a coincidence, either: The UN Human Rights Council will hold a hearing on the detention of the Uighur community in early November, where Chinese officials will have to answer questions about their treatment of Muslim minorities.
A brief overview of the crackdown against the Uighurs
Xinjiang, where about 10 million Uighurs live, is an autonomous region in China’s northwest that borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia. Once situated along the ancient Silk Road trading route, Xinjiang is also a major logistics hub for Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative.
China has increasingly tried to draw the region into its orbit, starting with a crackdown in 2009 following riots there. Officials in the region began implementing repressive policies, most notably in 2016 and 2017, that have curbed religious freedom and increased surveillance of the Uighurs, often under the increasingly hollow guise of combating terrorism and extremism.
Those repressive policies include a ban on certain Muslim names for babies and another ban on long beards and veils. The government also made it illegal to refuse to watch state television, or stop children from attending government schools.
The government also reportedly tried to promote drinking and smoking, because people who didn’t drink or smoke — such as devout Muslims — were deemed suspicious.
“The ultimate goal, the ultimate issue that the Chinese state is targeting [is] the cultural practices and beliefs of Muslim groups,” James Millward, a professor at Georgetown University, told me in August.
“Reeducation camps” are perhaps the most sinister pillar of China’s “de-extremification” policy. The Chinese government hasn’t revealed much about what’s really going on, but leaked documents and firsthand accounts from people detained at the camps have helped paint a disturbing picture of what amounts to modern-day concentration camps.
Detainees are reportedly subjected to bizarre exercises aimed at “brainwashing” them as well as physical torture and deprivation.
A UN human rights panel condemned the treatment of the Uighurs in August, but the international community has yet to take aggressive action against China over this issue. Some US lawmakers have pushed the Trump administration to consider sanctions against Chinese officials, and asked the Commerce Department to limit the sales of technology to China, which the government uses to surveil and repress minority groups.
Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), chair and co-chair of the Congressional Executive Committee on China, released a new report on the state of human rights and the rule of law in the country and proposed bipartisan legislation calling on the Trump administration to pressure the country to close the camps.
On Tuesday, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent government agency, said it was “deeply” troubled by the developments in China.
“Until recently, authorities denied the existence of these draconian camps, and now they have cloaked their repression in legalese,” USCIRF chair Tenzin Dorjee, said in a statement. “This drive to crush religious minority communities is not letting up — it is in fact getting worse — and it is being directed by those at the highest levels, both within the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.”
